Direct answer

Spigot/Paper wake-up-inactive settings periodically let otherwise inactive entities run updates. Tune a specific category only after confirming its inactive-entity behavior is part of the actual problem; reducing wake-ups may alter villagers, animals and farm mechanics.

How to check it

  1. Check the affected world’s spigot.yml world-settings overrides and the relevant entity-activation-range category.
  2. Measure a farm or villager area with a spark profiler while players are nearby and when they move away. Record observable AI/production behavior as well as MSPT.
  3. Identify the category (villagers, animals, monsters, flying-monsters) before changing wake-up frequency.

What to change

For each category, *-every controls the minimum interval between wake-ups, *-for the duration and *-max-per-tick the per-tick cap. These values are ticks, not seconds. Example below shows documented default-style keys; do not treat it as a faster recommendation.

# spigot.yml:
world-settings:
  default:
    entity-activation-range:
      wake-up-inactive:
        villagers-every: 600
        villagers-for: 100
        villagers-max-per-tick: 4
Trade-off

These settings only apply to entities that have become inactive. Lowering an activation range and changing wake-up settings are not interchangeable. Test animal behavior and villager restocking before deployment.

Software and version notes

Keys shown are from the PaperMC Spigot configuration reference. Forks and Minecraft releases may differ; use your generated configuration, including world overrides. Modded Fabric/Forge/NeoForge servers do not share these Spigot YAML keys.

Verify the result

Restart when required, repeat the same farm/villager workload, and compare before/after TPS or MSPT plus whether the entities still behave as expected. Revert the backed-up values if behavior breaks.

References